01c. 1896 ADI came to recognise that, apart from her [Françoise's] own kinsfolk, the sufferings of humanity inspired in her a pity which increased in direct ratio to the distance separating the sufferers from herself.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
02c. 1896 ADThe real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
03c. 1896 ADthat profit which good things bestowed on us by teaching to seek pleasure elsewhere than in the barren satisfaction of worldly wealth.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
04c. 1896 ADFor her [Françoise], wealth was like a necessary condition without which virtue would lack both merit and charm. She made so little distinction between the two that she came to see their qualities as interchangeable, expecting material comfort from virtue and moral edification from wealth.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
05c. 1896 ADHe could see her, but dared not remain for fear of annoying her by seeming to be spying upon the pleasures which she tasted in other company, pleasures which - while he drove home in utter loneliness, and went to bed, as anxiously as I myself was to go to bed, some years later, on the evenings when he came to dine with us at Combray - seemed illimitable to him since he had not been able to see their end.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
06c. 1896 ADMy aunt must have been perfectly well aware that she would not see Swann again, that she would never leave her own house any more, but this ultimate seclusion seemed to be accepted by her with all the more readiness for the very reason which, to our minds, ought to have made it more unbearable; namely, that such a seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing charm of repose.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
08c. 1896 ADThere is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...Marcel Proust / quote ↗
09c. 1896 ADWhat we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
10c. 1896 ADForgive me, Bertrand, for having on that day loved in you a beauty in which your self-esteem could take no pride, which could not in any way determine my affection.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
11c. 1896 ADWhen we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells, asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
13c. 1896 ADHis jealousy, like an octopus which throws out a first, then a second, and finally a third tentacle, fastened itself irremovably first to that moment, five o'clock in the afternoon, then to another, then to another again. But Swann was incapable of inventing his sufferings. They were only the memory, the perpetuation of a suffering that had come to him from without.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
14c. 1896 ADOther people are, as a rule, so immaterial to us that, when we have entrusted to any one of them the power to cause so much suffering or happiness to ourselves, that person seems at once to belong to a different universe, is surrounded with poetry, makes of our lives a vast expanse, quick with sensation, on which that person and ourselves are ever more or less in contact.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
16c. 1896 ADEvery individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before — indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
17c. 1896 ADin my cowardice I became at once a man, and did what all we grown men do when face to face with suffering and injustice; I preferred not to see themMarcel Proust / quote ↗
19c. 1896 ADAmong all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then, sweeps over the human spirit. For then the creature in whose company we are seeking amusement at the moment, her lot is cast, her fate and ours decided, that is the creature whom we shall henceforward love. It is not necessary that she should have pleased us, up till then, any more, or even as much as others. All that is necessary is that our taste for her should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled so soon as - in the moment when she has failed to meet us - for the pleasure which we were on the point of enjoying in her charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage - the insensate, agonising desire to possess her.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
20c. 1896 ADHe made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette's company, a sort of indifference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion which, in a pair of lovers, fully and finally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. He never spoke to her of this misadventure, he cased even to think of it himself. But now and then his thoughts in their wandering course would come upon this memory where it lay unobserved, would startle it into life, thrust it more deeply down into his consciousness, and leave him aching with a sharp, far-rooted pain.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
21c. 1896 AD... Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
22c. 1896 ADThis was to say, however, that she did not long, at times, for some even greater variation, that she did not pass through those abnormal hours in which one thirsts for something different from what one has, when those people who, through lack of energy or imagination, are unable to generate any motive power in themselves, cry out, as the clock strikes or the postman knocks, in their eagerness for news (even if it be bad news), for some emotion (even that of grief); when the heartstrings, which prosperity has silenced, like a harp laid by, yearn to be plucked and sounded again by some hand, even a brutal hand, even if it shall break them; when the will, which has with such difficulty brought itself to subdue to its impulse, to renounce its right to abandon itself to its own uncontrolled desires, and consequent sufferings, would fain cast its guiding reins into the hands of circumstances, coercive and, it may be, cruel.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
23c. 1896 ADWe consider it innocent to desire, and heinous that the other person should do so.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
24c. 1896 ADThere is nothing like desire for obstructing any resemblance between what one says and what one has on one's mind.Marcel Proust / quote ↗
